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Katie Reytar

Bio

Katie Reytar is a Research Associate in the Forests Program. Her expertise focuses on GIS spatial analysis, modeling, and data management to inform environmental policy and management decisions. She provides GIS support to projects across the Institute--primarily the Forest Program’s Global Restoration Initiative and the Governance Center’s Land and Resource Rights project. Additional areas of project work include Water Quality, Coastal Ecosystems (Reefs at Risk Revisited), and Agricultural Sustainability.

Prior to joining WRI, Katie worked as an environmental engineer for the consulting firm ERG and supported various U.S. government clients, including the Environmental Protection Agency. She also interned at the World Wildlife Fund, performing GIS work for the Conservation Science and Humanitarian Partnerships programs.

Katie has a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Environmental Science and Management from the Bren School at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Today is International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples -- a good day to reflect on the achievements and challenges Indigenous Peoples still face, including the issue of legal security of land and natural resource rights. How well do national laws protect the interests of these historically marginalized communities?

Local communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America can lose access to critical resources when land rights are weak, threatening food and incomes for more than two billion people. Three fundamental goals must be achieved to improve land rights.

Recent research from WRI and the Rights and Resources Initiative found that the world’s 513 million hectares of legally recognized community forests store 37 billion tonnes of carbon—29 times the annual carbon footprint of the world’s passenger vehicles.

The impacts of oil extraction in Ecuador illustrate why secure community forest rights are necessary to protect both livelihoods and the environment.

The just concluded U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit focused attention on Africa’s promises and challenges, including energy, agriculture and the $14 billion in investment pledged by companies. The visiting heads of state—just shy of 50—also discussed climate change and its effects on crop production, nutrition and food security. New research by the World Resources Institute and Rights and Resources Initiative on the climate dividends of secure community land rights can help Africa address these challenges.

With more than 75 percent of the world’s coral species and twice the number of reef fish found anywhere else in the world, the Coral Triangle is the center of the world’s marine biodiversity. Stretching from central Southeast Asia to the edge of the western Pacific, 130 million people in the Coral Triangle region depend on marine resources for food and livelihoods. In this way, the region’s coral reefs and associated fisheries are vital to people and national economies, but they’re also severely threatened by overexploitation.

Recognizing the critical role that coral reefs play in people’s lives and the regional economy, the governments of the six countries that make up the Coral Triangle—Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste—came together in 2009 to form the largest marine governance initiative in the world, the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF). Their common goal is to manage their valuable marine resources so that they can continue to provide benefits to people in the future.

Publications

The Economic Case For Securing Indigenous Land Rights in the Amazon

A new report offers evidence that the modest investments needed to secure land rights for indigenous communities will generate billions in returns—economically, socially and environmentally—for local communities and the world’s changing climate. The report, Climate Benefits, Tenure Costs:...

A National Modeling Analysis on Increasing Cost Effectiveness Through Better Targeting of U.S. Farm Conservation Funds

In this second installment of our 3-part series on better targeting of U.S. farm conservation funds, WRI found that combining geographic targeting with benefit-cost principles could potentially yield seven to 12 times...

This report is a map-based analysis of threats to coral reefs around the world, with particular focus on the countries of the Coral Triangle—Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste. It examines present pressures on coral reefs, including...

This report provides a detailed assessment of the status of and threats to the world's coral reefs. It evaluates threats to coral reefs from a wide range of human activities, and includes an assessment of climate-related threats to reefs. It also contains a global assessment of the...

Under the Reefs at Risk Revisited project, WRI and its partners have developed a new, detailed assessment of the status of and threats to the world's coral reefs. This information is intended to raise awareness about the location and severity of threats to coral reefs.